Science Update

There’s a bacterial parasite living inside a protozoan parasite living inside termites, which are parasites living inside our houses if not our guts.

However the tiniest pest in this nested pestilence, the bacterium, has a plausible alibi because it gives back maybe more than it gets. That qualifies it as a symbiont, the symbiosis having to do with what enables termites to digest dead wood, as in your porch.

Researchers have sequenced the bacterium’s genome because they’d like to learn the same trick. If we could digest dead wood commercially, we could use it as biofuel.

Well, shit. Why not just burn it?

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>